Why We Always Cover Union Fights From the Perspective of Workers, Not Bosses

This month marks the 10^th birthday of our continuing labor reporting project, Working In These Times. While In These Times has long been a champion of the union movement, WITT stepped it up with daily reporting at InThe​se​Times​.com. Our Golden Rule: Report from the perspective of workers, not bosses.

Reviewing some of the more than 4,500 stories, I am struck by the workers we’ve met. There’s former turkey plant worker Esmundo Juarez Carranza, fired for taking a bathroom break. ​“They treated us worse than animals,” he says.

There’s Samantha Rodriguez, who reported sexual harassment to her boss at a Walmart warehouse, only to have him ask her out. She says: ​“I pride myself on being an independent woman. I do remodeling, I hang drywall, I put in floors. … I went to warehouses because I like doing that kind of work. Now, I won’t step foot in a warehouse. I refuse to.”

There’s YMCA worker Linda Aguilar, who says: ​“The Y claims they want to ​‘disrupt the cycle of poverty.’ But it’s not lost on me that they’re employing mostly Black and Brown women, and they’re paying them poverty wages.”

There’s Fight for $15 leader Douglas Hunter, a single father and $9.25-an-hour McDonald’s worker: ​“Many people thought we were crazy two years ago when we walked off our jobs in New York and demanded $15 an hour. They don’t think we’re crazy now.”

Corporate America has spent 50 years turning a weak labor law regime even more to its advantage. Democrats have done little to stop them, while Republicans cheer them on. U.S. union density has declined from 20.1% in 1983 to 10.5% today. That means 90% of workers are at the mer- cy of their bosses. Most can be fired at will.

Our original labor reporter, David Moberg, never one to be a Pollyanna, said organized labor was ​“stuck, but stirring” in 1976. In 2015, he wrote a piece titled, ​“Saving Labor’s Sinking Ship.”

But in reading the past 10 years of reporting, I see workers taking up the oars. 

I became Working In These Times’ editor in 2012, a complete novice to the beat. (When reporter Bruce Vail talked about ​“the Fed,” I thought he meant the Federal Reserve, not the AFL-CIO.) Labor was riven by turf battles, like the notorious inter-union ​“nurse wars” in California. The innovative energy was in workers’ centers, which represented those hindered from unionizing by law: domestic workers, warehouse workers, restaurant workers, car-wash workers. The Chicago teachers were just about to walk out and the public launch of Fight for $15 was still four months away.

I never would have guessed that fast-food workers would make $15 a basic demand or that teachers in a dozen states would follow Chicago and walk out, not to mention that National Domestic Workers Alliance Director Ai-jen Poo would be Meryl Streep’s 2018 Golden Globes date.

Little of this activity, however, has increased union density, and the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision chips away at public-sector unions, organized labor’s last bastion.

Perhaps we should instead focus on union propensity—the fighting union spirit, as old-school labor folks might say. WITT proves that spirit alive and well. A growing strike wave indicates a stirring. As the singer-organizer Joe Hill put it:

If the workers take a notion, they can stop all speeding trains / Every ship upon the ocean, they can tie with mighty chains / Every wheel in the creation, every mine and every mill / Fleets and armies of the nations, will at their command stand still.

David Moberg, forgive me, but I’ll say it: The labor movement is on the move. We look forward to introducing our readers to the workers who power it in the years to come.